Zagat guide changes scoring system

Published 1:33 pm, Wednesday, October 26, 2016

The Zagat 2017 New York City Restaurants Guidebook is being published Wednesday with a combination of spanking new and same old. What's new, in addition to a brighter cover, is the scoring system.

After more than 37 years, the original format for rating restaurants, based on a scale of 1 to 30 as devised by the founders, Tim and Nina Zagat, is gone. In its place are rankings that go from 1.0 to 5.0, with decimals. The change was made, said a spokeswoman for the survey, now owned by Google, because the Zagat audience preferred a simpler system.

In the 2017 guide, Le Bernardin, which has received the top rating for food every year since 2010 (that's what is not news), gets a 4.9 out of 5.0 instead of a 29 out of a possible 30.

Among the restaurants that made the list of the top 20 for food, there are newcomers: Gabriel Kreuther, Tocqueville, Tanoreen, Scalini Fedeli and Sushi Nakazawa. Per Se, which was rated best for food in 2009 and has been in the top 20 for the last 11 years, is missing from the 2017 ranking. Graffiti, Estiatorio Milos, L'Artusi and Annisa were also dropped from the top 20.